“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” (As You Like It)

More on The Metropolitain Elite and ‘experts’

Tom Nichols, a foreign policy analyst who specialises in Russian affairs has written a wise and comprehensive post in defence of the general status of ‘expert’. It is really worth reading—here.

There’s a big gap in his argument though. It ignores a lot of the political context around expertise.

In ‘Post-democracy’ Colin Crouch did a fine job of explaining the unbalanced debates and the lack of pluralism in modern capitalist societies. Working as distinct micro-economy, the policy community have evolved into a self-serving social caste. To reprise a point I made in an earlier post about The Metropolitan Elite, this is something that the public may actually grasp very clearly, while the policy community, with its inflated sense of how benign it is, doesn’t.